primeideal

Translation nuances

2026-06-14T21:16:01Z

Gospel reading today was from Matthew, where Jesus calls the apostles. The version that the pastor read aloud was very close to, but not quite the same as, what was printed in the bulletins.

( Matthew 10:8a )

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Dear Crucifer (Crossworks 2026)

2026-06-13T01:43:49Z

Hello, thank you for creating for me! I'm also primeideal on Ao3, and I'm requesting fic for all fandoms. Treats are enabled.

I am someone who tends not to draw a very sharp distinction between "crossovers" and "fusions" per se, so I've opted into both; most of my prompts are for "what if X met Y," but if you want to interpret that in a more "fusion"-centric light, feel free. Obviously, it would be impossible to prompt for every possible character dynamic, so please consider this only a starting point--I'd be excited to see any combination of characters for these fandoms that you're excited about.

General likes

-canon-divergence AUs

-five things

-worldbuilding

-dialogue

-wit and wordplay

-nonstandard formats (documentation, epistolary, etc.)

-time travel

-happy endings

-sad endings (when providing some measure of closure or melodrama; I'm fine with character death)

DNWs:

-explicit sex (but fade-to-black or innuendo is fine)

-underage characters having sex

-rape/noncon

-moralizing/didactic stories (characters Learning An Important Lesson about the value of tolerance, etc.)

-non-canonical allegories of current events and/or contemporary politics

-themes of cynicism or futility, or that the (canon's) main plotlines "are for nothing"

False Doctrine Duology, Oxford Time Travel Universe, Polar Explorer RPF

False Doctrine/OTTU: This feels like a really natural combination, particularly the WWII-era books. "Keeping calm and carrying on in the war, aspiring to be cool detectives like Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane, criticizing architecture that's trying to look medieval but is actually just Victorian pseudo-medieval...The Anglicans know what they're about." Give me earnest people who take their faith seriously (but also laugh at themselves!) Does U of T have a time travel department? What is the Canadian time travel situation like? Maybe the vicar from "Blackout" and Charlie Boult could work together and teach small children to hotwire cars. You know, for the war. And then maybe they could kiss. To defeat Hitler.

False Doctrine/Polar Exploration: Maybe the timing works out for Kit to meet Cherry-Garrard in WWI and they become friends and help each other work through their trauma? (Apparently the way Cherry met George Seaver, Wilson's biographer, was by Oriana Wilson going "I know he's a priest but he's cool, hear me out.") I am especially fond of "Worst Journey" and the Heroic Age more generally, but I would also love to learn more about your favorite polar explorers!

OTTU/Polar Exploration: Michael Davies wants to witness various examples of heroism and boom, there he is reading a book about Shackleton and hoping they don't have to amputate his feet. Obviously, it's probably difficult to send a time traveler to Antarctica or on a ship where everyone's supposed to be accounted for, but do the techs ever brainstorm ideas? TJ Lewis: "no color line in the Arctic" Matthew Henson: "yeah, but we have to work with Robert Peary, which is worse." OC Inuit time travelers exasperated at colonial expeditions? Again, don't feel limited to UK expeditions, I'd be happy to discover new faves!

Animorphs, Farscape, Stormlight Archive

Animorphs/Farscape: I'm kind of imagining this in the pre-canon timeframe for Animorphs. Ax & Rygel getting to enjoy food and eating things together? Elfangor and Zhaan being adorable blue friends? (Maybe they have to temporarily "share unity" like Zhaan and Crichton.) Alloran + Crais & Talyn? Disaster antiheroes with their cute ships. <I named this sexy inanimate object after my beautiful wife!> "Aww, that's so sweet. Uh, my disgraced former subordinate named this traumatized child after her dead dad." <Bro.> "Bro." If you want to bring in Esplin and the Yeerks, maybe they're involved somehow with Scorpius' mind chips?

Animorphs/Stormlight Archive: Adolin and Jasnah on one hand, and Rachel on the other, are canonically described as "they could walk through a battle and come out looking totally unscathed, why do some people have all the luck, and also if you think they're dangerous on their own you should see them fighting alongside their cousin." Anything drawing on these parallels would be great. Maybe Shallan and Marco somehow communicate via seons and commiserate over their respective bisexual awakenings?

Farscape/Stormlight Archive: Taln and Talyn are not only almost name twinsies, but also love fighting unwinnable battles, suffering stoically, and are probably insane but still more sane than half the people around them. Maybe they meet on Braize between rebirths? IDK.

Steerswoman, Stormlight Archive, Vorkosigan Saga

Steerswoman/Stormlight: Both Rowan and Shallan have have conversations in their respective fourth books that hinge on a misunderstanding of "power," and it's just like...two nickels! Shallan stumbles through a weird portal in the Cognitive Realm and winds up in Rowan's realm? One of them happens across the other one's logbooks? Fusion where Jasnah is a Steerswoman and Shallan is her apprentice? (I imagine that the Steerswomen's prohibition against lying would be a disaster waiting to happen with Shallan's...everything.)

Steerswoman/Vorkosigan: Credit to pendrecarc on dreamwidth for coming up with this galaxy-brained prompt: what if Rowan's world was the long-lost Alpha Colony, and the Betan Astronomical Survey team rediscovered it instead of the events of "Shards of Honor"? Maybe Cordelia finally explains to Rowan what's up with the wizards, or maybe she accidentally winds up under the ban and gets very exasperated with "Alpha colonists!" How much do the "Christers" know about their homeworld, and what does Cordelia make of them? (I have not read beyond "Falling Free;" I'm fine with spoilers if you want to bring in Vorkosigan characters/events from beyond that point, but some of it may be lost on me.)

Stormlight/Vorkosigan: Again, Cordelia making contact with a society that's less technologically developed and being unsure how much to share with them is a possibility. I would also be interested to see how Stormlight's themes of "broken people channeling their brokenness" intersect with Vorkosigan's take on disability. How would someone like Bothari or Miles or the quaddies experience Surgebinding?

Animorphs, Pitch

I feel like the Animorphs' hometown is plausibly San Diego (ocean+big zoo+various California hints), Mike used to be married to a sports journalist named Rachel in San Diego...if you screw with the timelines enough, it could happen. (Or maybe they're two different Rachels and he just has a type.)

Marco deals with his celebrity in fine style, heroically trying to rescue Ginny from being the most important person in the room by stealing the spotlight/making conversation/awkwardly flirting, and a friendship strikes up? Bill's tragic backstory involves The Sharing? Livan obtained illegal access to an Escafil device and that's how he recovered from all those injuries during the World Baseball Classic?

Project Hail Mary (book), Polar Explorer RPF

Ghosts of polar explorers roast Stratt behind her back after the Antarctica incident and others are like "eh, she had a point?" They roast Grace behind his back for being so jazzed about science but not nearly jazzed enough about the suicide mission part, and others are like "eh, he also has a point?" I don't know if there's a non-cracky way to do this but the parallels amuse me.

--
Again, this is just a starting point, anything involving these fandoms would be great. Thanks!

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(SFF Bingo): Hyperion, by Dan Simmons

2026-06-12T22:47:22Z

What I'd managed to osmose about this book: it's interesting thematically/religiously, but also it can be very #menwritingwomen, and some of the later sequels are iffy. Also, it won the Hugo Award. I mention this not because I necessarily agree with Hugo voters' tastes, but because clearly it was considered enough of a standalone to be well-regarded on its own merits, not just "part 1 of N."

Premise: hundreds of years in the future, the planet Hyperion is infamous for its four-armed, metallic, horrific deity called "the Shrike," worshipped by faithful across the galaxy. Also for its "time tombs" which appear to be traveling backwards in time with their "anti-entropic fields." With war looming, seven people with different connections to Hyperion are summoned for a pilgrimage to the Time Tombs and the Shrike. (The Shrike likes prime numbers.) As they journey, they relate their stories and explain what brings them there. Like the "Canterbury Tales" (which I haven't read), the bulk of the story is here in the individual backstories.

1. A Catholic priest tries to uncover the mystery of a lost colony which worships an ancient cross--probably placed thousands of years before Jesus lived on Earth.
2. A military cadet in virtual reality simulations has amazing hot sex with a mysterious woman who appears to be an AI living in the sims.
3. A poet gets drunk, swears a lot, genetically modifies himself to resemble a satyr, and finds his muse is most active when the Shrike is killing people.
4. A Jewish father searches for a cure for his daughter, who contracted a mysterious disease when visiting the Time Tombs. A lot of arguing with God, and working through the theology of the binding of Isaac story.
5. A female noir detective takes on a client, who turns out to be an AI built around the persona of the historical poet John Keats (known for the unfinished poem "Hyperion")
6. A spaceship technician falls in love with a woman from an isolated world being colonized by the galactic Hegemony; because of time dilation, their visits span about four years in his life and fifty in hers (starting when he's nineteen and she's almost sixteen, classy).
7. There is no seven because one person dies or disappears or something, which might be a problem because of the prime number thing, but don't worry about it, they all have bigger problems.

So...yeah, this was all over the place. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I found the two religiously-themed stories to be by far the most interesting. Sol muses that "God broke His word by destroying the Earth a second time in the way He did," and Duré's recognition of "the tone of complacent finality common to oft-repeated formulae and religious litanies" was nuanced and self-aware.

It's one of those where "men do, women are" might not be so bad if it was just one example on its own, but the overall ratio of male interiority to women being objects of desire/mourning/etc. is frustrating. For a chapter like Sol's, it's like, okay, I like seeing the depiction of a man whose predominant role in the story is as a parent rather than an academic, that's a characterization that women get more often so it's good to see a man. But cumulatively, it's annoying. And then there's just a lot of gratuitous squick/body horror/edgelordy swearing that's not really my thing.

There are glimpses of other factions in the galaxy--small clones that work on ships, blue-skinned androids, translating dolphin language--but not a lot of in-depth worldbuilding about them. The exception is the AI, who get expounded on a lot more in Brawne's chapter, and are eventually revealed to be taking a more active role in events than they seem. But I wanted even more of the "and here's how the strands tie together."

Polar exploration drinking game! "...Mamet Spedling had been a minor explorer affiliated with the Shackleton Institute on Renaissance Minor..." (Simmons wrote the novel "The Terror," so shouldn't be a surprise.)
The scattering of humanity after the destruction of Earth is named the "Hegira," like the event in the Islamic calendar, nice worldbuilding.
The pilgrims travel in a ship called the Benares, named after the Earth city of Varanasi in northern India. This isn't particularly interesting on its own, but I'm mentioning it for reasons to be explained later.
Martin's chapter didn't do much for me on its own, but the opening is hilarious, and the commentary on postliterate societies has aged well since 1989: "IN THE BEGINNING was the Word. Then came the fucking word processor. Then came the thought processor. Then came the death of literature. And so it goes."
Merin and Siri meet at a wild sesquicentennial party that goes on for five weeks. Warning to all US Americans :P

( Spoilers for the Priest's story and the overall ending )

Bingo: One-Word Title, Unusual Transportation (there's a "treeship," the Benares is pulled by manta rays, a wind-powered sailboat across the "Sea of Grass," even flying carpets known as "Hawking mats.")

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Roads Not Taken

2026-05-25T18:31:47Z

This is gonna sound extremely vague to people who aren't me, sorry. Just wanted to ramble.

One of the great things about Ao3 is that there's no minimum requirement in terms of length or amount of conflict or...plottiness. If I have an idea for an AU, I can just post a snippet of in-universe documentation or plotless fluff or angst to be like "and this is the AU."

Previously noted: "if I see a prompt I like for actual fanfiction, no matter where it falls between the extremes of "highbrow worldbuilding" and "self-indulgent kinky id," it's going to Ao3. Because it's fanfic, transformative works, I don't have copyright, yada yada. But if I see an Original Works prompt that's RTMI, well...if it's something that could lend itself to being plotty or mainstream, I'm less likely to write several thousand words of it for a fanworks exchange, because part of me thinks, "if I'm putting in that much effort I might as well try to sell it to a short story market." That's not at all to say that it's likely or I'd manage it, just that it's less likely."

Now, there are other "fandoms" that aren't quite Original Works per se, but are sufficiently public domain to be published elsewhere (eg, Arthuriana, Greek mythology, etc.) A while back I had a plot bunny (1) for one of these that was like "what if X didn't happen," and it's like...I could just write it for myself. But if I did enough research to do it justice, again, I feel like I'd want to try to get it published under my wallet name.

The problem with this specific premise is not only that getting published is hard, but "what if X didn't happen" isn't, in and of itself, a plot. It needs another layer of "and Y did happen" to make it a plot, and a story, and I haven't really had that. I had a similar dilemma a while back with entirely fictionalized events, and that one whas ultimately successful, so there's precedent.

A couple years ago I contributed to an anthology that was definitively speculative. Now the same publishers have another call for submissions, and I've been brainstorming what I might want to write about there. I had been doing some research for an unrelated fic and after percolating for a while, it occurred to me, I could combine "neat setting from this fanfic" with "neat extraterrestrials from this anthology theme," and like, that would go together well. (Plot bunny 2.)

But then when I was thinking about it some more, it was like, "this might be a good opportunity to go with plot bunny 1, which might not find an outlet otherwise. I mean, as long as there are extraterrestrials with technology far beyond human knowledge showing up anyway, what's one more anachronistic discovery anyway? Aliens did it, don't ask questions." But I'm not sure that would really fit the themes of this submission call quite as well.

So I feel like the upshot is I should write version 2 of the story, and then also write version 1 just for myself, even if I don't submit it. Would it be possible to spin off version 1 into an unrelated story in a different publication? Maybe, but there would be so much overlap between them that I'm worried I'd get the reputation as "the person who can only write one thing." Maybe that's not entirely fair...

What I really want is just a call for submissions in some "flash-length in-universe documentation from alternate histories" anthology, there's gotta be one of those coming at some point...

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The South Pole: A Historical Reader (editor: Anthony Brandt)

2026-05-25T01:46:42Z

The title is a slight misnomer, it's an anthology of Antarctica exploration more broadly, but we get the idea.

One map in the front, that's great, but we could use even more maps. As my mom once told my brother's girlfriend (who was giving us a tour of the newspaper where she works), "sometimes we are just dumb and don't know much about geography." More maps.
There's a lot of just direct excerpting from a longer work, which is mostly fine, but then the annotations or footnotes will refer to the longer work where that's not relevant ("see the tables in the appendix," etc.) Could have been helpful to make clearer who those editors were, as distinguished from the overall editor.
Surprisingly consistent use of Fahrenheit? I guess the UK didn't convert to Celsius until the 1960s, that surprised me.

A few specific highlights/details:
( okay, not exactly a few )

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Wiki Wanderings: I Got It There Then

2026-05-20T01:57:08Z

To make a very long story short, there was a discussion in another hobbyist community I'm part of (not the fanfic world, but it's had similar issues in recent years about "hey, how do we establish clear rules to prevent people from using LLMs in our creative writing projects") about LLM detectors, and someone mentioned that recently, he had found a program called "Pangram" to be powerful and effective. So I was just screwing around looking to see how recent/well-regarded that was. Instead of information about the program, I wound up skimming stuff about actual pangrams, like "The quick brown fox jumps over a lazy dog." And then it pointed me to one of the greatest natural history papers ever published. (The title is a pangram.)

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(SFF Bingo): The Left Hand of Darkness, by Ursula K. Le Guin

2026-05-15T22:35:23Z

"Le Guin was a visionary who wrote a really deep and literary novel about gender and sexuality and how much of it is a social construct or whatever": I sleep
"Le Guin was an Antarctica fangirl who had opinions about the 1980s TV series about Shackleton and Scott and wrote a story about two guys on a slightly homoerotic eighty-one day sledge trek": REAL SHIT

Premise: Genly Ai is the ambassador from the Ekumen (alliance of thousands of societies across eighty-plus planets) to the planet of Gethen, aka "Winter" for its frigid weather. He starts off in the country of Karhide, which seems like a comparatively backwards monarchy; the prime minister, Harth rem ir Estraven, says "Karhide is not a nation but a family quarrel." After meeting with no success in Karhide after two years--and after Estraven gets fired and exiled for supporting him--Ai tries again in neighboring Orgoreyn, which is more of a sprawling bureaucracy with guaranteed employment for everyone and heated rooms. Maybe more promising? Nope, they send him to be interned and abused by the secret police. Eventually Estraven rescues him; there's a lot of culture shock and miscommunication, but Ai finally comes to believe that Estraven really does believe in the cosmopolitan mission of the Ekumen in contrast to smallminded nationalism.

Okay, so what about the sex stuff. Gethenians are sexless most of the time; for a few days every month, during their reproductive years, they go into "kemmer," and develop sex organs, with a random chance of being male or female on any given occasion. This is accompanied by an intense physical drive to reproduce, so they partner up with someone else in kemmer. (At least in this book, though maybe not in the spinoff stories, all of the couplings are male-female.) If the female partner gets pregnant, those sex characteristics persist through the pregnancy and gestation period, otherwise both parties become androgynous again for the next month.

Consider: There is no unconsenting sex, no rape. As with most mammals other than man, coitus can be performed only by mutual invitation and consent; otherwise it is not possible. Seduction certainly is possible, but it must have to be awfully well timed.
Consider: There is no division of humanity into strong and weak halves, protective/protected, dominant/submissive, owner/chattel, active/passive. In fact the whole tendency to dualism that pervades human thinking may be found to be lessened, or changed, on Winter.
...They do not see each other as men or women. This is almost impossible for our imagination to accept. What is the first question we ask about a newborn baby?

I'm unconvinced! Humans have a long track record of finding ways to oppress each other that have no grounding in scientific fact; I usually see "owner/chattel" language referencing racist slavery systems. I don't see why similar bigotry wouldn't exist in a place like Gethen. While Gethen has small-scale skirmishes, assassinations, secret police brutality, etc., they've never actually had an all-out war, which Ai seems to think is related to the "no rape, no subjugation" system. And while we often talk about babies as "is it a boy or a girl," we also often see birth announcements with babies' height and weight, which is really not at all something we do with adults. It's because they don't have language or personality traits or anything to communicate with us yet that we go with vital stats instead.

But where it really didn't feel as radical as advertised/feared is that all the chapters (even the ones that aren't directly narrated by Ai) use "he," "man," "brother," etc. as default. Even the spaceships are "she"!

"...it is not human to be without shame and without desire."

"I suppose the most important thing, the heaviest single factor in one's life, is whether one's born male or female. In most societies it determines one's expectations, outlook, ethics, manners--almost everything...[women] don't often seem to turn up mathematicians, or composers of music, or inventors, or abstract thinkers."

The Ekumen have instantaneous interplanetary communication, and telepathic language that makes lying impossible. At times it seems utopian, although there was a war a couple centuries ago. I really don't believe that social stereotypes about what roles men and women should play would continue to be this pervasive across thousands of cultures.

"The Left Hand of Darkness" was written in 1969. By 1983 we get Douglas Hofstadter's "A Person Paper on Purity in English," which goes disturbingly far in making the point that using 'he' as default is kinda messed up. A couple years later (1985), Hofstadter writes:

My feeling about nonsexist English is that it is like a foreign language that I am learning. I find that even after years of practice, I still have to translate sometimes from my native language, which is sexist English. I know of no human being who speaks Nonsexist as their native tongue. It will be very interesting to see if such people come to exist. If so, it will have taken a lot of work by a lot of people to reach that point.

For me, reading this in the 21st century, it feels really bizarre--I think my native dialect is much closer to Nonsexist English than Hofstadter could have predicted. The way I generally talk about people I don't know, or only know as streams of text coming through a computer screen, is as singular they: "whoever wrote this is an idiot and they should be fired." (This usage has a very long history in English; I draw a distinction between this and situations where a specific person requests to be referred to as singular they consistently, but some people will lump these in as the same thing.)

Apparently Le Guin was responsive to this criticism and changed the way she handled Gethen in later stories, but I can only judge it on what's in front of me, and the use of "he," to me, says a lot more about the world of 1969 than the world of Winter. (I'm going to use "he," "brother," etc. for the rest of this review, but take this with a grain of salt.)

Anyway, obviously there are a lot of taboos from our world that don't translate into Gethen society. Siblings are allowed to kemmer together, but they can't vow a monogamous relationship--after one of them has a child, that's it, they have to break up.

( spoilers )
Okay, now for the fun part, the sledging!

"What for?"
"Curiosity, adventure." He hesitated and smiled slightly. "The augmentation of the complexity and intensity of the field of intelligent life," he said, quoting one of my Ekumenical quotations.

I am not trying to say that I was happy, during those weeks of hauling a sledge across an ice-sheet in the dead of winter. I was hungry, overstrained, and often anxious, and it all got worse the longer it went on. I certainly wasn't happy. Happiness has to do with reason, and only reason earns it. What I was given was the thing you can't earn, and can't keep, and often don't even recognize at the time; I mean joy.

If I were to project this onto my Antarctica faves (ignore this part if you don't know or care who these people are): Ai is more in the role of Cherry-Garrard, who at first feels less able to cope with the physical demands of sledging, but as the survivor, is responsible for putting together his recollections in the past tense, blending the perspective of what he felt at the time and what he has learned since. Estraven is a combination of Bowers (shorter but surprisingly durable, incredible grasp of logistics and food supply, which is necessary for winter travel) and Wilson (insists on routine and patience, even when it drives Ai up the wall):

The business of setting up camp, making everything secure, getting all the clinging snow off one's outer clothing, and so on, was trying. Sometimes it did not seem worthwhile. It was so late, so cold, one was so tired, that it would be much easier to lie down in a sleeping-bag in the lee of the sledge and not bother with the tent. I remember how clear this was ot me on certain evenings, and how bitterly I resented my companion's methodical, tyrannical insistence that we do everything and do it correctly and thoroughly. I hated him at such times, with a hatred that rose straight up out of the death that lay within my spirit. I hated the harsh, intricate, obstinate demands that he made on me in the name of life.

Estraven also keeps a journal of the trek, to keep in touch with his family back home. Oftentimes this is little more than the date and reports on temperature. Ai teaches him mindspeech, but he's careful not to let any hint of that slip into the journal, and so it's clear that we're getting different points of view on the same event. Again, the contrast between "one party's recollection after the fact" and "people's real-time chronicles, which are probably brief and to the point because of the weather," is very much in the spirit of polar narratives.

I don't want to push this too far, but I think that the contrast between the nationalistic goals of the Karhide and Orgoreyn factions, and Ai's mission, which eventually becomes Estraven's, being both universal with the Ekumen and an intensely personal relationship, probably is making a broader point about exploration in our world.

Likewise, one of my favorite quotes from last year's bingo was in Le Guin's "Paradises Lost":

History must be what we have escaped from. It is what we were, not what we are. History is what we need never do again.

If it's not already obvious, I have been feeling a lot of emotions about Antarctica in the past few months or so, and in particular, I do think it's important that there is one place in the world that has nothing in the way of "History" with a capital H--warfare and oppression and suchlike--but does have a track record of science and exploration and friendship and narratives. Maybe this distinction is shallow or doesn't matter to other people. But I keep thinking of that quote, even though I know perfectly well it has nothing to do with Antarctica per se. Having read this book, I feel a little better about that connection; maybe Le Guin wouldn't think I'm crazy for it. :)

Bingo: I think the safest/most obvious connection is Politics. For various stretches of the squares, I think there are cases to be made for Unusual Transportation (sledge hauling), Vacation Spot (if you're an Antarctica nerd), Explorers/Rangers, First Contact (there were stealth observers sent to Gethen before, but Ai is the first to proclaim himself as an alien). I also think there's a case to be made that it should be eligible for exactly one of "Trans or Nonbinary Protagonist" or "Non-Human Protagonist," but it's in a quantum state of superposition and you can't determine which is which for most of the month...

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Superlatives game: Terra Nova

2026-05-14T10:59:06Z

Scheduling worked out, I was able to accompany my parents on an incredible globe-trotting vacation, so that's been amazing. This almost perfectly overlapped with @threeweeksfordreamwidth ! So a couple days lated, copied from @maevedarcy, a fun meme.

(PS: new icon is from @reeby10, thank you so much!)

( Read more... )

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(SFF Bingo): Jade War, by Fonda Lee

2026-05-09T14:17:07Z

This is the sequel to Jade City, picking up a year or so after that book ended and continuing over the course of several years. Although our protagonists, the No Peak Clan, and their enemies the Mountain are still nominally at piece, international powers are continuing to fight over access to jade, and so a conflict that was at first limited to one city becomes increasingly global. There are a lot of peripheral characters, but it's a case of "even when I don't remember exactly what that guy's name is, I remember his role in the plot," it wasn't difficult to keep track of the main plotlines.

After the events of the first book, Anden is no longer willing to handle jade, and so Hilo sends him to the country of Espenia to study abroad and live in the Kekonese-Espenian diaspora community. His description of culture shock, and seeing how some Kekonese traditions and rituals get recombined and changed as part of the new Kekonese-Espenian culture, felt compelling and well-written. Similarly, Shae's thoughts about the pressures women leaders face, and the risks of being overly aggressive or overly accomodating, in a male-dominated field, were interesting without being didactic.

A Green Bone leader couldn’t be soft or hesitant, especially if she was a woman and people were expecting her to fail.

Social progress, Kekonese-style, Shae mused. Equal opportunity to die by the blade.

So I enjoyed the first part of Anden's plotline, watching him see what it means to be a "Green Bone" in Espenia, and his relationships with people there. Unfortunately, where things lagged for me were in introducing the "Crews" (local Espenian organized crime groups). We already had organized crime elements going on with the clans in Kekon; moving to another country just for more of the same was underwhelming. So the one customs official who's like "excuse me, we're not allowed to take bribes/gifts from passengers" was a nice touch, at least the entire system isn't broken.

Duels are a great opportunity for clever one-liners:

“Old Uncle in Heaven, judge me the greener of your kin tomorrow, if it be so,” she murmured in prayer to Jenshu the Monk, the One Who Returned, the patron god of Green Bones. She paused. “And if you judge otherwise, at least give me credit for a dramatic attempt.”

Cultural stereotypes:

When there’s a problem to be solved, the Espenian tries money first, then resorts to violence. The Kekonese tries violence first, then resorts to money.

Last time around, I was like, "the other countries aren't totally expies, which is good." This time, I was approaching it more from a perspective of "okay, if this is fantasy!USA and fantasy!China, what does that mean?" Kekon is not nearly as big, relative to its world, as RL mainland China. But the musings about "okay we'll send students to study abroad" "how will we prevent them from just staying overseas?" "make it a condition of their scholarship money that they come home and work for us for a few years" and "we can't just go overseas to assassinate someone, even if he's terrible, that's kind of against international law" are still, uh, very relevant.

I also like how the Mountain and No Peak sort of go back and forth in their pragmatic uses of internationalism/nationalism, without being completely indistinguishable--it's the more xenophobic Mountain who are politically in favor of the bill allowing more refugee migration, while No Peak, even though they're more in favor of opening up to the world, wind up opposing it. Hilo is such a villainous character at times that a version of the story written from the Mountain's POV could probably be equally compelling and sympathetic.

Now there was even limited reciprocal membership privileges with the Janloon City Club on the other side of the Financial District, which had long been the old boys’ social club of the Mountain clan. Even during the recent period of clan war, money was more fluid than blood. The Green Bones of the two clans might be deadly enemies, but their tribute-paying businessmen remained able to network over drinks at elite establishments.

A couple of my nitpicks from the previous review still stand (weird jump into present tense for describing Kekonese festivals; the sex scenes early on are awkward). Sex notwithstanding, the romantic relationship arcs in general are handled well.

( Spoilery thoughts: )

Bingo: Vacation Spot (there's even an in-universe afterword written as a "tourist guide!"), Cat Squasher, Author of Color, probably Politics. I don't think it quite counts for "Feast Your Eyes on This": "food or a meal is significant to a story's plot." Not significant, but lots more descriptions of various meals than most of what I read.

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(SFF Bingo): Falling Free, by Lois McMaster Bujold

2026-04-26T15:16:22Z

Spinoff from the Vorkosigan Saga, set two hundred years before the main series. Leo Graf, an engineer who works for the huge GalacTech company, is sent to a space station to instruct apprentice engineers. Turns out that most of the residents are children (the oldest class is twenty) who were genetically modified to have two extra arms instead of legs and other tweaks to be healthier/optimized for zero-gravity, and are known as "quaddies." Leo is able to stay calm and not react with revulsion, but the more he learns about the quaddies' precarious legal status and treatment, the more he feels like he needs to do something about it, even if he's just one guy. The good news is, sometimes social and ethical problems turn out to be just engineering problems...

In some ways, Leo is a foil to Miles; Miles is a disabled person, surrounded by able-bodied people, but he bluffs his way through things and his heroism turns out to be contagious. Leo is an able-bodied person, surrounded by the quaddies, who are seen as disabled in planetary gravity, and his leadership is similar.

“Or,” Leo raised his voice, “you can take your lives into your own hands. Come with me and put all your risks up front. The big gamble for the big payoff. Let me tell you”—he gulped for courage, mustered megalomania—for surely only a maniac could drive this through to success— “let me tell you about the Promised Land . . .”

I had recently reread part of "The Warrior's Apprentice" so the "please don't yell loudly when you're making a surprise entrance into the room" thing was fresh in my mind...

Even if Colonel Wayne in Nest of Doom led his troops into battle with his rebel yell over their comlinks, I don’t think real marines would do that. It would be bound to interfere with their communications.

There's a similar line with "we have to be careful about what videos we show people." "Oooh, pornography?!" "...No." that has Miles and Elena parallels.

And, of course, the themes of seeing the inherent worth and dignity in every human life, even the smallest and most vulnerable, are clear. (The quaddies were also products of the uterine replicators from Beta Colony, which leads the galaxy in a lot of technological innovations.) There's also a character whose bitterness is similar to that of the villain in "Mountains of Mourning"--when your life has been crushed by the system, it feels unfair for other people to have opportunities that you were denied.

As with Cordelia, Leo's worldview is informed by Christianity, but he's not tendentious about it. Can we jeopardize the mission to rescue one guy:

"Maybe. I’m not sure it’s good military thinking—the precedent had to do with sheep, I believe—but I don’t think I could live with myself if we didn’t at least try to get him back."

The weird legal status of the space station is kind of a parallel with "A Drop of Corruption":

GalacTech holds Rodeo on a ninety-nine-year lease with the government of Orient IV. The original terms of the lease were extremely favorable to us...

A great description of what planetary gravity would be like if you'd never experienced it before:

Leading from the hatch to the hangar floor was a kind of corrugated ramp. Clearly, it was designed to break down the dangerous fight with the omnipresent gravity into little manageable increments. “Stairs.”

The authorities try to enforce a "mothers are naturally parental, they must mind the babies, menfolk do the other stuff" policy, which Leo thinks is ridiculous, coming from a galaxy with uterine replicators, and the upshot is that a new father doesn't understand things like diaper rash and has to have his partner explain it. A good example of the limitations of this kind of societal structure, without being preachy. (This book features the most gripping, stressful, action-packed scene hinging on a diaper bag you've ever seen.)

Early on, it's established that quaddie education focuses on engineering, not great men of history...

“...a typical downsider history of, say, the settlement of Orient IV usually gives about fifteen pages to the year of the Brothers’ War, a temporary if bizarre social aberration—and about two to the actual hundred or so years of settlement and building-up of the planet. Our text gives one paragraph to the war. But the building of the Witgow trans-trench monorail tunnel, with its subsequent beneficial economic effects to both sides, gets five pages. In short, we emphasize the common instead of the rare, building rather than destruction, the normal at the expense of the abnormal. So that the quaddies may never get the idea that the abnormal is somehow expected of them. If you’d like to read the texts, I think you’ll get the idea very quickly.”

“I—yeah, I think I’d better,” Leo murmured. The degree of censorship imposed upon the quaddies implied by Yei’s brief description made his skin crawl—and yet, the idea of a text that devoted whole sections to great engineering works made him want to stand up and cheer.

And we get a nice payoff to this much later:

Shooting people was such a stupid activity, why should everybody—anybody!—be so impressed? Silver wondered irritably. You would think she had done something truly great, like discover a new treatment for black stem-rot.

Polar exploration drinking game!

“What if someone asks what happened to my feet?” Silver worried aloud.
“Amputated,” suggested Leo, “due to a terrible case of frostbite suffered on your vacation to the Antarctic Continent.”

I've said this before, but Bujold is great at the "leaving out the parts people skip" of pacing. Like, "Claire and Tony have some questions for Leo about the legal situation elsewhere in the galaxy" > "Claire and Tony make a run for it" follows pretty quickly in succession, whereas in other books I feel like there would be a lot more hedging/introspection before that.

( Spoilers )
Bingo: so, we get one mulligan square every year, and while I have not availed myself of it for the first four, this might be the time when I use one. You could probably make an argument for "politics" but by that token I think you could make an argument for almost anything for "politics."

Edit to add: the ancient and honorable male art of "monitoring the situation!" :D

“Since then we’ve been tracking the D-620, and it’s continued to boost straight toward Rodeo. It doesn’t answer our calls.”

“What are you doing about it?”

“We’re monitoring the situation. I have not yet received orders to do anything about it.”

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Various updates

2026-04-23T21:50:13Z

I was feeling pretty optimistic about the sort-of-blank-verse poem I wrote a couple months ago, both in terms of how I felt about it personally and "no news is good news" when other people are getting rejections via Submission Grinder ;) but that didn't pan out. So now I get to try sending it (and some older stuff) to a new journal. (This is a spinoff of another magazine that I generally like and support but have been burned by in that they never responded, not even to the "hey did you get this," the first time I submitted to them. To their credit, the new mag has a policy of "if you don't hear anything after four weeks, assume rejection.")

Fun fact: in undergrad I semi-often wound up writing blank-verse-ish stuff as the result of a tug of war between my professors, who liked pretentious completely free verse, and me, who preferred more formal constraints like sonnets and stuff. ;) This time at least it's more deliberate.

I am out of the country seeing the world for the next few weeks! Not sure what my computer access will look like, I may have some downtime, but no promises--comments on exchange fic, etc. may be delayed. I have stocked up on plenty of reading material so hopefully there will be a couple bingo reviews coming later or sooner.

In the process of stocking up, there was a free giveaway of hardcopy books on a library shelf, and the original "Mistborn" was up for grabs, score! I don't think I need it on the plane, but good for canon review, or to give to someone else to get them into Sanderson :P

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(SFF Bingo): Sinopticon, translated and edited by Xueting Christine Ni

2026-04-22T23:26:52Z

Anthology of thirteen Chinese science fiction stories, all appearing in English for the first time. Ni notes in the introduction that "Even the most whimsical and humorous of space-travel stories will tend to end with a melancholic tone, because Chinese stories tend not to have happy endings," and in one story's endnotes, that "In the Chinese language, time is signified by the temporal adverb, so all actions are, without context, in the present."

Unfortunately, the prose comes off in many places as clunky at best and not proofread at worst, so I'm not sure how much to chalk up to the translation. And many of the stories (not only those written by men) were weird about (heteronormative) romance.

That being said, given my gripes with the prose, I did want to give a shoutout to "Qiankun and Alex," by Hao Jingfang, for successfully translating three-year-old speech in a way that makes it clear it's a three-year-old and not just clunky prose.

"What am I learning you?" Alex asks Qiankun.
"That which I don't know," Qiankun replies.
"What do you know?" Alex asks again.
"I know a lot of things," Qiankun replies.
"Show," Alex requests.

The two highlights for me were both on the longer side. "The Great Migration," by Ma Boyong, imagines that Mars' close approach to Earth every two years would culturally become an excuse for lots of travel, even when the technological needs weren't as prevalent. If you can suspend your disbelief at the dysfunctional premise, it's very funny (and based in reality, as Ni mentions in the endnotes, given the huge scale of migrant workers vacationing during Lunar New Year). Ma is also the author of "The First Emperor's Games," which I enjoyed from Broken Stars.

"They say that during every Great Migration, Olympus gets so overcrowded that Mars tilts a few degrees further on its axis."
"Is that a joke?"
"It's a red planet joke. I guess you haven't red enough to get it," I quipped back.
...
"You never know, apparently the occurence of one night stands increases tenfold during the GM."
"Of course, but the funny thing in this joke is that during the GM, whilst you might be able to find a partner you desire for a perfect one-night stand, you'll be hard pressed to find a room."

(How common is "whilst" in UK English, compared to "while"? I felt like the "whilst" per page count density was out of control, but that might just be my US dialect talking.)

"Flower of the Other Shore," by A Que, is a very humorous, meta, and occasionally fourth-wall breaking story about zombies. The narrator is a zombie, and his "who am I, what am I doing here" amnesia is reminiscent of "Project Hail Mary," in a good way. Zombies lose their powers of speech, but have innate sign-language skills.

Just as we are half fighting with instinct, and half talking nonsense, the thin man who was bitten gets to his feet, his body rigid, and starts charging towards the crowd: eyes blood-red, teeth bared. The blood from the wound on his throat has already darkened and begun to congeal.
"Hello, I'm new," he signals to me in a friendly manner. "What are the rules on this side?"
"Don't run in front of a--" I begin warning, but before I can finish signing "gun", the barrel of a Gatling gun sweeps towards him, its stream of high caliber rounds tearing him into two.

Spoilers: our narrator is not like other zombies.

"Shut your mouth!" the captain roars at me.
But I couldn't. "You don't understand, when you lose something for so long and finally get it back, you cherish it even more, like love and health, like your voice. When I became a Stiff, the first part of my body to go permanently stiff was--don't look at me like that, I mean my vocal cords. Rigor mortis set in, and I could only talk with hand signals. But the voice is a gift of gods, the cry of beasts, the chirping of birds, the rustle of the wind and the splash of waves of the sea, each with their own music. Besides, if I want to be with someone, I can actually tell her that I love her, and oh, Captain, has anyone ever told you they loved you? Ah...ah, judging by your face, that's a no.... doesn't matter, doesn't matter, there's still time, before you become a Stiff too... Don't hit me! Don't hit me!..."

Bingo: Translated, 5+ Short Stories, Author of Color, does One-Word Title count if there's a subtitle? "Sinopticon: A Celebration of Chinese Science Fiction."

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(SFF Bingo): Virginia Fantastic, edited by James Blakey

2026-04-14T23:40:09Z

(Ye Olde Generic Disclaimer: sometimes when I review short fiction/poetry anthologies it's because I am, or am very close to, one of the contributing authors, in those cases I don't review my/our pieces.)

Virginia Fantastic is an anthology of flash fiction set in Virginia (the US state). Mix of subgenres and locations. I personally find that humor works well in this format, and horror less so.

Sometimes part of the appeal comes from just learning about a bizarre place or historical incident that I wasn't previously familiar with. For instance, it turns out there's a twisty road that was advertised, to appeal to motorcyclists and sports car enthusiasts, as "Back of the Dragon." You can guess the premise of the eponymous story. Likewise, there was a collection of enormous presidential heads that was open for only four years and then abandoned. This became "Mother of Presidents" by Adam S. Crowe, which features some humor at the expense of William Henry Harrison.

Both of Megan McClintock's pieces were very well-written: "They Called The Body Jane" is a dark fantasy look at the aftermath of the Starving Time, which is about as pleasant as it sounds. And "In Bad Faith" is a humorous look at a politician selling his soul to the devil.

"You took an Uber Black to the Metro stop yesterday. The contract is clear. To make an appointment, you have to ride the Metro from D.C."

I wanted this to be even longer with more inanities specific to the DC/Virginia area, "politicians are the real evil" is pretty straightforward but there's only so much you can do in 1000 words.

Bingo: Five Short Stories, Published in 2026, Small Press, probably a good Vacation Spot for some people.

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(SFF Bingo): Isles of the Emberdark, by Brandon Sanderson

2026-04-13T02:33:44Z

New year, new bingo, let's go!

The planet "First of the Sun" has historically been low-tech. While most people live on the "homeisles," there are a few who travel to the Pantheon archipelago, where everything from insects to trees to sea monsters to dinosaur-like land monsters can and will kill you. Sixth of the Dusk is a trapper, one of these brave souls. Trappers spend their days doing things like trying to sic poisonous rodents on their rivals, although Dusk thinks that might be a little unnecessary.

Most people in "First of the Sun" have magical companion birds called the Aviar, most of which are parrot-like, which can grant them magical powers. At first I was like, okay, nice made-up fantasy-world name. Only on page 72 was it like, the places where the Aviar are raised are called...Aviaries. Lol.

However, once interstellar travelers called the "Ones Above" make contact, technological progress comes quickly. Dusk finds his traditional way of life becoming outdated, and struggles to find a fulfilling vocation, while the planet in general tries to avoid being colonized and made puppets of the newcomers. A lot of the plot revolves around different people patronizing or belittling Dusk in various ways, and pushing back against the "noble savage" trope. Vathi is a homeisler:

"We could kill them all," Dusk said. He rushed over to Vathi, taking her with his right hand, the arm that wasn't wounded. "With those weapons, we could kill them all. Every nightmaw. Maybe even the shadows, too!"
"Well, yes, it has been discussed. However, they are important parts of the ecosystem on these lands. Removing the apex predators could have undesirable results."
"Undesirable results?" Dusk ran his hand through his hair. "They'd be gone. All of them! I don't care what other problems you think it would cause. They would all be dead!"
Vathi snorted, picking up the lantern and stamping out the small fires it had started. "I thought trappers were connected to nature."
"We are. That's how I know we would all be better off without any of these things."
"You are disabusing me of many romantic notions about your kind, Dusk," she said, circling the dying beast.

And Dajer is one of the "Ones Above":

"I like you, Sixth," Dajer said. "I like your bluntness. Your uncivilized, simple sense of pure morality."
Did Dajer...think people were honest because they were less advanced in technology? Did he think that people on Dusk's planet were somehow nicer than ones from the stars?
It was an incredibly stupid perspective. It stood out in this man, who was otherwise so calculating and expert at maneuvering conversations. This flaw in Dajer was like a long scratch, leaking water, in an otherwise well-crafted hull.
But Dusk supposed everyone had their flaws; that was part of what made them people. And not...beings from some story, with an "uncivilized, simple sense of pure morality." Dajer had exposed a weakness to be exploited; Dusk could only hope that he had not unwittingly done the same thing.

The first section alternates between the "present day" and "five years ago," the latter being the narrative originally contained in the standalone novella "Sixth of the Dust." I had read that many years ago in a collection of Sanderson short fiction, but remembered basically none of it, so it was good to have the refresher, and I thought the interweaving of Dusk and Vathi in the present and retracing their steps in the past was handled well without being gimmicky.

There's another POV character who shows up in the prologue and reappears in the second part; Starling, an eighty-seven-year-old dragon (that's young in dragon years) who is in exile from her own people, now shapeshift-trapped in human form indefinitely, and living on a spaceship with a Ragtag Bunch of Misfits from elsewhere in the Cosmere. Like with "The Sunlit Man," there are so many callbacks/allusions to other Cosmere books that it's sometimes overstimulating for those of us who are trying to remember "wait, do we know so-and-so?" and I'm not sure how it would land for someone not familiar with the wider series. A non-comprehensive list, under spoiler cut:

( Read more... )

I liked this part, and it'll be funnier if you know Mistborn:

"Quite upsetting of the Scadrians, claming someone else's homeworld, but you know how they are. Rusting this! Rusting that! I scowl and throw coins in your face!"
"Don't you literally worship a Scadrian?" Nazh asked.
"That's different," Ed said. "He is nice."

But if you've read "Tress" and the "plucky crew rallying together behind their cheerful and optimistic captain," a lot of it is going to feel familiar. So this part was less gripping for me.

The running joke is that, in Dusk's POV, he regularly points out "that wasn't a direct question, so he wasn't obliged to answer." Starling's impression:

What a curious man. It was like...he knew the rules of ordinary conversation, but chose to live outside them, like a verbal conscientious objector.

And even by the end, when he's changed a lot:

Of course, the bones did not reply. He liked that about bones.

I'm currently in a mood where it's like "every time we come across a quote that makes me emotional about polar exploration in a book that has less than nothing to do with polar exploration, take a shot:"

"Coming here was a disaster."
"Yes."
He turned to her.
"Yes," she continued, this whole expedition will likely be a disaster, a disaster that takes us a step closer to our goal."
He checked Sisisru next, working by the light of the now-rising moon. "Foolish."
Vathi folded her arms before her on the roof of the building, torso still disappearing into the lit square of the trapdoor below. "Do you think that our ancestors learned to wayfind on the oceans without experiencing a few disasters along the way? Or what of the first trappers?"

It does stick the landing well, with hope for a brighter future for First of the Sun in general, and for Dusk--Sanderson is good at adding a line or two to assure us that the meaningful friendships which have been built won't be completely abandoned, even in a new era!

Bingo: perfect fit for Explorers/Rangers (hard mode), also Published in 2026, Politics. Technically Starling could qualify as Older Protagonist, and if you want even more of a technicality, non-human protagonist, but in both cases I suspect we can do a lot better in terms of the spirit of the square.

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In the Land of White Death, by Valerian Albanov

2026-03-29T22:36:48Z

In 1912, the Saint Anna, led by Lieutenant Brusilov, sets out for the Northeast Passage (it's like the Northwest Passage but less interesting), which has been navigated once before; he's mostly interested in hunting walrus and polar bear, etc. They get iced in and drift north for over a year. Albanov, the navigator, is "dismissed from duty" in late 1913 (but is stuck on the ship with everyone else). Early in 1914 he asks to venture south on his own, to avoid being stuck in another winter. About half the crew volunteers to come with him. Most of his party makes it to the Franz Josef Archipelago to the south, but as they're moving east across the archipelago, people get sick or the party just gets split; only Albanov and Alexander Konrad survive. They get picked up by another Russian polar vessel that's also been out of touch for two years, and when they get back, they have to be informed WWI has started. Albanov kept a diary of his trek, and wrote this up in 1917 using that as a basis; he died two years later, from either typhoid or an exploding munitions boxcar (the Russian Revolution was a fun time).

They had to make their own sledges and kayaks before setting off, because Brusilov didn't have any of that kind of stuff, and Albanov spends a lot of time yelling at the guys not to just leave them behind and go on skis, we actually need these to navigate, fools. I can sort of visualize loading kayaks on sledges to cross ice, but lashing sledges to the kayaks to cross the water gaps is impressive! (Later he talks more about "we lashed them on crosswise," but it was hard for me to visualize at first. They start with five sledges and also five kayaks that take turns riding on each other, it's not five sledge-cum-kayak-vehicles.)

Albanov was definitely a member of the Fridtjof Nansen fan club; they have basically no books on the Saint Anna, but they do have a map of Nansen's travels from "Farthest North." He and Johansen had approached the Franz Josef Archipelago from the east (rather than from the west like Albanov), Albanov is trying to find the supplies where they'd made camp, in the middle.

There's one woman on the Saint Anna, Yerminiya Zhdanko. She was originally hired as a nurse, and apparently took very good care of Brusilov during his illness, but also is the crew's "hostess" at meals. Is this just men defaulting to "oh of course the woman will be doing the ~feminine~ jobs"?

Denisov, a harpooner who stays with the Saint Anna, gets about as much biographical background as anyone. He "was half Ukrainian and half Norwegian." But because this is a Russian narrator writing in 1917, Denisov's father's home is in "the Ukraine," oof.

There's probably a spectrum to draw rating all the expedition leader+second-in-command dynamics. But Brusilov is new levels of awful. His POV on the crew asking to leave:

"At first I tried to talk them out of their plan...A small but increasing number of them decided to stay, more than I actually would have liked, but I did not want to force anyone to leave."

AKA our supplies are so limited, he needs some of the crew to leave so the remaining supplies will go farther, and then too many people stayed back with him.

And here's Albanov shortly before their departure:

Late in the evening the lieutenant called me once more into his cabin to give me a list of items we would be taking with us and which I must, if possible, return to him at a later date. Here is that list as it was entered into the ship's record: 2 Remington rifles, 1 Norwegian hunting rifle, 1 double-barreled shotgun, 2 repeating rifles, 1 ship's log transformed into a pedometer for measuring distances covered, 2 harpoons, 2 axes, 1 saw, 2 compasses, 14 pairs of skis, 1 first-quality malitsa, 12 second-quality malitisi [a footnote explains that malitisi are sacklike garments used in lieu of sleeping bags], 1 sleeping bag, 1 chronometer, 1 sextant, 14 rucksacks, and 1 small pair of binoculars.
Brusilov asked me if he had forgotten to list anything. His pettiness astounded me.

Albanov's general tone throughout (and I guess this is feasible to put into print if all but one of your comrades are dead) is "why am I surrounded by idiots, you are all so lazy, don't sleep, get up and start sledging." But when they leave someone behind who's dying and unable to be carried, he sends a sledge to go back for him. He says that he's become more religious; he carries an icon of Saint Nicholas, and has a dream of him that he interprets as miraculous.

As they're marching across the ice, two guys steal a bunch of supplies on the guise of a "scouting expedition" and disappear. Albanov is furious, but reasons that they can't waste time trying to track them down. A week later, they reach land, it's great, there is fresh food and flowers and everything is wonderful. Turns out the thieves are also there.

My inner voice whispered the oath I had taken to "shoot the ignominous thieves on the spot if ever I encountered them." Anger rose up inside me again. Then I took a closer look at the fellow: He was truly pitiful and his pleas went straight to the heart. I thought of the miracle that had delivered us from an icy death and how I had just now so deeply felt the beauty of the earth and of life, like thought someone brought back from the dead. Swayed by the overwhelming power of such emotions, I decided to pardon the man. Yet had I met him only a few hours earlier, on the ice, I would most certainly have executed him, which alone could expiate his crime.

(But also, Albanov never mentions the names of the two miscreants. Was one of them the one who survived?)

You know how some people really bond together and become friends while facing ordeals together? Yeah nope:

During the most critical moments I was always essentially alone, and it was then that I understood the profound truth of the precept: "It is when you are alone that you are free. If you want to live fight for as long as you have strength and determination. You may have no one to help you with your struggle, but you will at least have no one dragging you under. When you are alone, it is always easier to stay afloat."

I mean, personally, I've definitely...been there. It's just odd to find that expressed as a precept. Maybe it's a Russian thing.

Worsley when they're almost to Elephant Island :handshake meme: Albanov when they're almost to Northbrook Island
not like this, we're so freaking close

During that brief instant, every stage of our journey flashed vividly through my mind with the speed of lightning. I saw the deaths of our three comrades; I saw Lunayev and Shpakovsky carried away in the midst of the storm, and finally myself and Konrad about to be drowned. I can remember exactly what I was thinking: "Who will ever know how we died?" "No one!" I told myself. The idea that no one would ever know how we had fought against these indominable elements, and that our end would remain a mystery forever, was an unspeakable torture to me. My last ounce of strength rebelled against such an unsung disappearance.

Illness triggers the third man factor:

I also had persistent nightmares and imagined that there were three of us on the island. During these mild hallucinations I would get up and hurry over to my sole companion, busy with his excavations, and ask about our third comrade without even knowing who it might be.

But shortly after this, the narrative starts switching between a last-name and a first-name basis for Alexander. :)

The footnotes are detailed and useful, so is the index. (Every time he uses the phrase "white death," take a shot.)

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Tent Life in Siberia, by George Kennan

2026-03-28T01:20:22Z

A little downtime between bingo years, and kind of figured "the only way out is through" when it comes to being weird about polar exploration fandom, so...wandered around a used bookstore and picked up some random titles that looked interesting, there may be more where this came from.

Expedition: the 1865-67 Russian-American Telegraph Company. People had tried to lay a telegraphic cable under the Atlantic Ocean, it didn't last, so another company was like "what if we go up the North American west coast, across the Bering Strait*, then across all of Russia and connect up with the existing telegraph system in Moscow?" So this was part of the exploration/research/preliminary scouting for that. It kind of ends abruptly with "okay never mind, they got the Atlantic Ocean route working after all, let's stop," but hey, that's just capitalism.

This is more of a humorous travelogue with lots of droll tongue-in-cheek, culture shock, wedding-crashers type stuff. Seasickness:

Mahood pretends that he is all right, and plays checkers with the captain with an air of assumed tranquillity which approaches heroism, but he is observed at irregular intervals to go suddenly and unexpectedly on deck, and to return every time with a more ghastly and rueful countenance. When asked the object of these periodic visits to the quarter-deck, he replies, with a transparent affectation of cheerfulness, that he only goes up "to look at the compass and see how she's heading." I am surprised to find that "looking at the compass" is attended with such painful and melancholy emotions as those expressed in Mahood's face when he comes back; but he performs the self-imposed duty with unshrinking faithfulness, and relieves us of a great deal of anxiety about the safety of the ship. The Captain seems a little negligent, and sometimes does not observe the compass once a day; but Mahood watches it with unsleeping vigilance.

(When my grandpa was writing up his recollections of his military experience, decades after the fact, he had some creative euphemisms for seasickness too, maybe this is just a travel literature staple.)

Many of the place names and Russian loanwords didn't have their spelling standardized by this point. Stuff like "yourt" and "toondra" are always in scare quotes, ditto his spelling for balalaika and sastrugi (which is admittedly not a super common word unless you're in polar nonsense fandom...) *And the body of water between Asia and North America is "Behring's Straits" at this point. Early on he complains about Russian transliteration, why is there a "W" in "Wrangell" [Island] or "Wladimir," why would you want to spell this province name "Kamtchatka," nobody pronounces the first "T." So that aged well! (Most of my knowledge of Kamchatka comes from playing, or at least setting up, games of Risk with my brother, who had a line about 'Kamchatka will never forgive you!!')

The word I wish they'd had a translation or gloss for is "verst," which I wasn't familiar with. A verst is 1.07 kilometers, or about 2/3 of a mile.

Nitpick: there are maps in the endpapers, which is great, but it's very zoomed out, a lot of it is the proposed route of the telegraph across the rest of Russia, and the map goes as far south as India and the Arabian Peninsula. Would have been better zoomed in on the area that's actually the focus, but maybe a lot of the smaller settlements didn't have their coordinates mapped...

Obviously Kennan is not a professional anthropologist so take the cultural observations with a grain of salt. I thought the contrast between "the nomads' culture can seem kind of ruthless and harsh to us, but that's a byproduct of the circumstances under which they live, they're as honest and hospitable as anyone else" versus "their cousins who live in settlements are just the worst, most lazy, and terrible" was an interesting parallel to the worldbuilding in cultures like the Outskirters from the Steerswoman series. The details of "these people live in their summer habitations for three months, damming up the river and catching lots of salmon, then go back to their winter village for most of the year," and "the central government of Russia is trying to tax people's fishing harvests so that they have insurance for years when there isn't a good catch" also seem like neat worldbuilding concepts. Maybe for future origfic.

One evening, soon after we left Shestakova, they [dogsled drivers] happened to see me eating a pickled cucumber, and as this was something which had never come within the range of their limited gastronomical experience, they asked me for a piece to taste. Knowing well what the result would be, I gave the whole cucumber to the dirtiest, worst-looking vagabond in the party, and motioned to him to take a good bite. As he put it to his lips his comrades watched him with breathless curiosity to see how he liked it. For a moment his face wore an expression of blended surprise, wonder, and disgust which was irresistibly ludicrous, and he seemed disposed to spit the disagreeable morsel out; but with a strong effort he controlled himself, forced his features into a ghastly imitation of satisfaction, smacked his lips, declared it was "akhmel nemélkhin"--very good, and handed the pickle to his next neighbor. The latter was equally astonished and disgusted with its unexpected sourness, but, rather than admit his disappointment and be laughed at by the others, he also pretended that it was delicious, and passed it along. Six men in succession went through with this transparent farce with the greatest solemnity; but when they had all tasted it, and all been victimized, they burst out into a simultaneous "ty-e-e-e" of astonishment, and gave free expression to their long-suppressed emotions of disgust. The vehement spitting, coughing, and washing out of mouths with snow, which succeeded this outburst, proved that the taste for pickles is an acquired one, and that man in his aboriginal state does not possess it. What particularly amused me, however, was the way in which they imposed on one another. Each individual Korak, as soon as he found that he had been victimized, saw at once the necessity of getting even by victimizing the next man, and not one of them would admit that there was anything bad about the pickle until they had all tasted it. "Misery loves company," and human nature is the same all the world over.

There's also a description of "Anadyr sickness" that's especially common in women, and that's really intriguing in light of what our culture would describe as "mass psychogenic illness." Low temperatures are survivable, but wind is a drag; nobody associates Siberia with mosquitoes, but mosquitoes suck. Many of the cultural allusions went over my head, but hey, he would probably say the same thing about our literature. There are a lot of John Franklin jokes. The Eastern Orthodox liturgy is very moving and they sing Christmas carols too.

A ball at the house of a priest on Sunday night struck me as implying a good deal of inconsistency, and I hesitated about sanctioning so plain a violation of the fourth commandment. Dodd, however, proved to me in the most conclusive manner that, owing to difference in time, it was Saturday in America and not Sunday at all; that our friends at that very moment were engaged in business or pleasure, and that our happening to be on the other side of the world was no reason why we should not do what our antipodal friends were doing at exactly the same time. I was conscious that this reasoning was sophistical, but Dodd mixed me up so with his "longitude," "Greenwich time," "Bowditch's Navigators," "Russian Sundays" and "American Sundays," that I was hopelessly bewildered, and couldn't have told for my life whether it was to-day in America or yesterday, or when a Siberian Sunday did begin. I finally concluded that as the Russians kept Saturday night, and began another week at sunset on the Sabbath, a dance would perhaps be sufficiently innocent for that evening. According to Siberian ideas of propriety it was just the thing.

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Very minor spoilers for "Project Hail Mary" (book and movie)

2026-03-22T02:36:22Z

( link contains actual spoilers, this is not really spoilery )

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vicious circle?

2026-03-14T03:14:15Z

Maybe I'm on the threshold of being able to articulate some new facet of the problem that I haven't been able to express before, or maybe it's all the same noise.

( tldr )

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Dear Author (Sufficiently Advanced 2026)

2026-03-10T19:24:38Z

Hello, thank you for creating for me! I'm also primeideal on Ao3, and I'm requesting fic for all fandoms. Treats are enabled.

Note for this particular exchange: I hope to be traveling at the time gifts are revealed, I may not be able to comment promptly. I look forward to savoring my gift when I have time to sit at a computer and read!

General likes

-canon-divergence AUs

-five things

-worldbuilding

-dialogue

-wit and wordplay

-nonstandard formats (documentation, epistolary, etc.)

-time travel

-happy endings

-sad endings (when providing some measure of closure or melodrama; I'm fine with character death)

DNWs:

-explicit sex (but fade-to-black or innuendo is fine)

-underage characters having sex

-rape/noncon

-moralizing/didactic stories (characters Learning An Important Lesson about the value of tolerance, etc.)

-non-canonical allegories of current events and/or contemporary politics

-themes of cynicism or futility, or that the (canon's) main plotlines "are for nothing"

Anathem

Pre-Contact Mathic Life

The Dictionary After the Second Reconstitution

Pre-Contact Mathic Life:

I love all the weird math monk stuff. Patterns for bells and sleeping arrangements! Clock towers! Labyrinths between the different tiers! Everything the Ita are doing behind the scenes to make it functional! Anything set in the world of the concents would be great. It sounds like Saunt Edhar's is more ascetic than some of the other concents, so something set elsewhere with different traditions could be a neat contrast.

The Dictionary After the Second Reconstitution:

What's going to happen post-canon as people react to new jargon from the Daban Arnud? Weird/nonsensical multilingual puns that make no sense? What languages do people speak with each other on the Daban Arnud? Were there Millennials patiently waiting to add their neologisms and then oops, aliens? Do the avout incorporate any vocabulary from the saeculars, or do they still consider that a corrupting influence?

Paradises Lost
WB: Any

What a fascinating story! The contrasts between how the Zeroes feel that they might be depriving their descendants of something important, and the descendants' awareness of their own good fortune, are powerful. "History must be what we have escaped from. It is what we were, not what we are. History is what we need never do again." Guh. And the commentary about "noble lies" being condescending and potentially as dangerous as fundamentalism was really well done. Anything in this setting would be fascinating, with canon characters and/or OCs.

I'd be interested in any other traditions similar to the way religion develops on the ship--things arising to respond to societal issues, and then over the generations, growing and evolving into something the Zero generation couldn't have predicted.

More about the dynamics of family units, motherchildren versus fatherchildren? What considerations do people take in choosing someone else to reproduce with?

Some of the missing scenes? How do we get from "Luis arguing about religion" to "Luis gets elected council leader" so quickly?

Future communication with earth? Do other ships eventually arrive on the new planet? What traditions have developed by that point?

Project Hail Mary

Steve Hatch

I love Steve and how faith and science complement each other for him. Ryland kind of lampshades "you're the most optimistic guy I've ever met," which is saying something by the standards of an Andy Weir novel. More about his optimism in dark times? He seems very confident in his belief that the Beatles are just objectively the best musicians; more of his unshakable takes? Is he still alive by the time of the Beatle (spaceships)' return, and if so, what does he make of them? How does he incorporate the discovery of Eridians into his worldview?

Remembrance of Earth's Past

Cheng Xin
Yang Dong
Ye Wenjie

Cheng Xin:

A fix-it where she doesn't miss Yun Tianming at their star? Any kind of outside POV on her and the many different hats she wears: Older men patronizing her during Project Staircase? The humans resenting her in Australia? Luo Ji and the museum? What if she'd stayed on the cylinder worlds near Jupiter where things felt "normal" and 2000s-y? Her relationship with Guan Yifan--is he really a different kind of human for having been to space, or are they more two sides of the same coin?

Yang Dong:

For someone who has very little time "on screen," she casts a long shadow over all of the books. More about her friendship with the programmer from "Death's End," and/or with Luo Ji? What if she'd survived--what would she have made of her mother's betrayal? How would things have gone with Ding Yi?

Ye Wenjie:

Secrets at Red Coast Base? Some more of the "declassified" documents? The early days of the ETO? What did she work out about Dark Forest theory before meeting Luo Ji? What if Yang Dong had talked to her about the documents she'd sneaked a look at? Or if Ye had lived long enough to discover more of Deterrence theory herself?

Steerswoman
WB: Any
Bel & or / Rowan

I was thrilled by the worldbuilding in this series--the depiction of Rowan's scientific inquiry is great, even if our perspective as readers is different from the characters'. And I especially enjoyed the complexity of Outskirter society in "Steerswoman's Road"--the tribes closer to the Inner Lands growing more militaristic and less cultured, the Face People and Efraim's weirdness around women, the naming ceremony and recitation of ancestors, the importance of poetry and lore--that makes them much more than "wilderness raiders."

There are lots of great tropey moments with Bel and Rowan that can be either shippy or gen: huddling for warmth, teaching each other swordplay, taking care of each other when they get dysentery! If you're so inclined, I'd be interested to see a shippy expansion on any of these, or something else along these lines. Another misunderstanding with the courtship gifts outside the tent?

Something more worldbuilding-focused elsewhere in the world would also be neat--documents at the Archives? Steerswomen and wizards' POV on the same events? What does religion look like in a world where Christian symbols and language exist but most people don't remember their homeworld? (I'd prefer no authorial bashing of any specific belief system or lack thereof, but canon-typical disagreements/skepticism on different characters' part is fine and expected!)

Crossover Fandom:

Sazed (Mistborn) & Taravangian (Stormlight Archive)
They both control two Shards now--Sazed's seem like inherent opposites, Taravangian's don't. What happens when they meet? Taravangian tries to talk Sazed into letting Taravangian combine more shards for the greater good? Sazed turns Taravangian's logic against him? Could they meet in some kind of pocket universe/Cognitive Realm nonsense/AU setting where their immense powers don't really come into play and it's just the two guys bickering at each other?

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(SFF Bingo): The Bone Ships, by RJ Barker

2026-03-10T19:10:49Z

Last bingo square: "Generic Title," title needs to contain one of a handful of cliche words, including "Bone" as an option. After a false start, tracked down this, the first in a trilogy.

The world of the Scattered Archipelago is almost all ocean, and there's a lot of seafaring. There's an ongoing war between the Hundred Islands and the Gaunt Islands, with both sides accusing the others of kidnapping children and forcing them into slavery or human sacrifice, but it's been going on so long that the beginning has probably been forgotten. Ships have historically been constructed from the bones of arakeesians (water dragons), but they're almost extinct now, so maybe the war will fizzle out because of lack of weapons?

This was a good example of indirect worldbuilding through language choice. The captain of a ship is generically "shipwife" and the disciplinary officer is "deckmother" (regardless of their actual sex); the default for generic person is always "woman or man" (rather than "man or woman"); ships are referred to as "he," a generic form of bravado is "tits" (where our world might use "balls"), etc. Not tendentious, but a good example of how background language subtly reflects how the characters, and the readers, view society.

There is also some interesting worldbuilding going on around the nonhuman creatures in the world. A ship can get magically-boosted wind speed/direction through the help of its "gullaime," a birdlike creature with magical powers, and the gullaimes seem to be related to the arakeesians in some fashion. But humans' exploitation of the gullaimes is basically slavery plus brutal eye trauma. It's strongly implied that the only reason our protagonists' ship is able to survive when others wouldn't is because they have an especially strong gullaime, or maybe just one that's been mutilated less than typical.

Unfortunately, I wasn't really invested in the POV character. Joron Twiner, nineteen, has been condemned to the "black ships" (crewed by criminals with lingering death sentences) after a miscarriage of justice. A young aristocrat killed his father in, essentially, a drunken vehicular accident (I liked this twist just because it was so mundane and, in a sad way, reflective of our world). Joron got his revenge in a duel, but due to the very hierarchical classist/ableist society, was criminialized anyway via a miscarriage of justice. Before the book begins, he was briefly made shipwife of his own ship, the "Tide Child" just because he wasn't part of any existing faction, and drinks away his days.

Then "Lucky" Meas Gilbryn shows up. A formidable shipwife and daughter of the ruler of the lands, she's been sentenced to the black ships nevertheless, and begins whipping everybody into shape on "Tide Child." Joron is demoted to "deckkeeper" (second-in-command), and basically we're just watching from his point of view as she delivers a bunch of training montages, etc.

I can see how, if Meas is the most active, taking-agency character, you might not want the entire story to be from her POV--she could come off as too overpowered. But Joron is even less interesting. It's not clear why she keeps him as her #2, he's mostly just along for the ride, and sometimes to play good cop to her bad cop. And then there's a Goblin Emperor-esque theme developing of "I can never be friends with these people, just their officer, oh well." Even when he occasionally shows agency, jumping into a fight, he doesn't know why he's doing it: "He almost brought his hand to his mouth upon saying it, he was so shocked by his own words."

At first we're told that Joron resents Meas for "taking" his job, even though he doesn't really do anything with it, and sort of led to believe that his alcoholism will become a problem. But that just fizzles out. There's a lot of one-liner italicized flashbacks to "as my father used to say" or to his father's death, but it doesn't really add anything. And maybe there's supposed to be a plotline around him overcoming cowardice, but I don't feel like his actions are that strange or unusual, everybody has a self-preservation instinct even on a ship of people condemned to death.

Meas does a lot of "who's with me? Are you with me?" "yes we're with you, shipwife" "I can't hear you, are you with me???" "Yes Shipwife!" "Say it louder" "YES SHIPWIFE" "okay, good, let's go." I find this kind of audience-participation thing patronizing, I don't need to see it in fiction.

The text tries to depict the horrors of war via "hurry up and wait" themes and repetition. As realistic as it is, I'm not sure it pays off in prose. Joron felt anxious. And then the enemy ship drew closer. The parrot said some curse words. And then the enemy ship drew closer. Meas adjusted her lucky hat. And then the enemy ship drew closer. We get it.

On a sentence level, it didn't seem to be very well edited, there are various runaway sentences and dangling modifiers:

"It did not take long for Tide Child, carried on the strange magic of the windtalker, which cooed to itself as it worked, for the ship’s lookouts to get a clearer look at the flukeboats."

"Solemn Muffaz nodded to Gavith, who ran to the bell on the rail at the fore of the rump of the ship." There's nothing wrong with this sentence but I feel like five consecutive prepositional phrases (of the exact same word/letter count) is too much.

When it comes to Call A Rabbit a Smeerp, everyone's threshold is different, but the sun, moon, and stars are, respectively, personified as the Eye, Blind Eye, and Bones of Skearith the Godbird. Every time. Characters get "eyeburned" instead of "sunburned." For me, personally, this was unnecessary and distracting.

Meas' backstory was intriguing. Hundred Islands culture places a strong value on childbirth and healthy babies; if a mother survives her first delivery and the baby has no birth defects, it's sacrified to become a magical "ghostlight" for the non-black ships. But Meas survived this ritual because the gods (Maiden, Mother, and Hag instead of Crone) didn't want her, hence the "Lucky" epithet. Meas' mother had twelve more children, which, as the most prolific matriarch on the islands, makes her the ruler. But Meas got sentenced to the black ships anyway. Is that because she's secretly working to end the war once and for all? Or some other kind of treachery?

This and the worldbuilding were compelling, but I'm not sure I'd be interested in seeking out two more books from Joron's POV. There's a lot of "oh well, we will probably all die, but we've been sentenced to death anyway so let's just do our duty," but after a few quick deaths of named characters in the early chapters, most of the book comes and goes without the stakes or tension feeling earned.

Bingo: Generic Title, could also count for Pirates, previous Readalong. Maybe Down with the System?

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Dear Pen Pal (Unsent Letters 2026)

2026-02-28T19:36:06Z

Hello, thank you for creating for me! I'm also primeideal on Ao3. Treats are enabled.

Note for this particular exchange: I hope to be traveling at the time gifts are revealed, I may not be able to comment promptly. I look forward to savoring my gift when I have time to sit at a computer and read!

DNWs:

-explicit sex (but fade-to-black or innuendo is fine)

-underage characters having sex

-rape/noncon

-moralizing/didactic stories (characters Learning An Important Lesson about the value of tolerance, etc.)

-non-canonical allegories of current events and/or contemporary politics

-themes of cynicism or futility, or that the (canon's) main plotlines "are for nothing"

Dune Movies

Chani & Liet

(Formats: Books/Articles, Journals/Diaries, Letters/Emails/Audio/Video transcripts)

Chani doesn't have a last name in movie canon, so if you're working just from the movies--what relationship do these two have? Something comparing and contrasting their relationships to Fremen religion/prophecy/fate versus free will, or interactions with the empire, could be neat. Scientific articles that Liet writes? Is she training Chani as a successor?

Alternatively: in book canon, Liet is Chani's father, suggesting that movie!Liet could be Chani's mother, which adds another layer of delicious wrinkles to everything. Letters they write when Liet is away on empire business? Is Chani curious or resentful about her family elsewhere in the galaxy? What hopes does Liet have for Chani, even if they never leave the pages of her journal?

Stormlight Archive

Shallan & any

(Formats: Books/Articles, Journals/Diaries, Letters/Emails/Audio/Video transcripts)

I think there's a lot of potential for correspondence in the post-canon era, with Shallan trying to communicate via seons from the Cognitive Realm. Worrying about Adolin? Theorizing with Navani or Jasnah as to what this might mean for the Radiants? Mentoring Gaz or some of her other squires remotely? Negotiating with Thaidakar? (I'm familiar with the rest of the Cosmere if you want to work in characterization/worldbuilding from other Cosmere books.) Trying to track down her family?

If you're interested in Shallan/Adolin, feel free to make it shippy, but I'm not interested in poly-shipping for this request. I subscribe to (and enjoy) the theory that Shallan is pregnant when we see her last, so I'd be happy with an OC kid showing up, but no need to include that if it's not something you're interested in.

It would also be neat to see more from Shallan's journals/sketchbooks/research during canon. Assignments she completed for Jasnah in Kharbranth? More of the spanreed notes from when she was "texting" Adolin in his self-imposed jail term? Research articles about the Radiants or Unmade?

I'm not super interested in Shallan's alter egos, so I'd prefer if they weren't a focus (mentions are fine).

Worst Journey

Birdie & Cherry & Wilson, Birdie/Cherry

(Formats: Books/Articles, Journals/Diaries, Letters/Emails/Audio/Video transcripts)

I love the contrast of all the different character voices--not just narrator!Cherry writing a decade after the fact, but also diary!Cherry in the moment and epistolary!Bowers being very proud of his cute green hat. Maybe another incident with different POVs on the same event, whether it be future!Cherry interweaving his voice with present!Cherry or just the contrast between different voices in people's respective diaries/letters home? (Doesn't have to be limited to the requested characters, outside POV from other crew is also great!) Letters they wrote to each other after the return party turned back, for dramatic irony and sadness?

For the tag "books and articles" in particular I'm imagining canon-divergence AUs. Everyone lives and Wilson gets to write nerdy research papers about the penguin eggs? The Winter Journey ends in tragedy, and maybe that changes the approach the polar party takes? Atkinson leads the group to search for Campbell's party in late 1912 and the world doesn't find out for years (or ever?) how close Scott et. al got? (Any of these premises could also work for other formats, of course!)

As usual, all of this is optional, anything about these fandoms/relationships will be great. Thanks for creating for me!

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I'm gonna rise to glory in/my stainless steel DeLorean

2026-02-28T02:35:34Z

I had read a few reviews of "Back to the Future: the musical" when it opened on Broadway, and the reviews boiled down to: 1. the DeLorean is great, 2. they tried really hard to stay faithful to the movie and not cut anything important, but they also added a bunch of songs, so it's lengthy, 3. reviewer didn't care much for the movie because it didn't flatter their preconceptions, and the musical isn't any better, we have to be more edgy instead of just nostalgia bait. I figured 2 and 3 would not be big drawbacks for me, and it was in Baltimore, so sure.

It was...fine? I didn't dislike it in an "didn't flatter my ideological preconceptions" way, but the intro felt rushed (trying to establish Marty's siblings as characters, over-the-top hamming, etc.) This is just based on the original movie, not the sequels.

Anyway, here are some things that I think they could have done differently, especially because it's an adaptation. I'm not sure I'd necessarily enjoy all of these, just things that might be interesting to try.

Arguably the relationship at the core of the movie is Marty & Doc's friendship! Let them sing a duet together!
The character of Jennifer (Marty's girlfriend) could easily be cut. At the end of the movie it's like "come quick, your kids are in trouble!" and then that actress didn't want to do the sequels, so they just...awkwardly wrote her out. Jennifer in the musical doesn't do anything useful either.
I understand that we kind of need Marty's siblings to set up the photo as a symbol of temporal paradoxing, but again, they just showed up in the intro song to establish one-note characterizations, then were different in the alternate timeline of the ending. I feel like the first few scenes in 1985 could have been more streamlined/less ludicrous "And Now We Are Breaking Into Song" moments.
Doc has a song called "For the Dreamers," where he talks about his scientific heroes--he has pictures of Edison and EInstein on his wall, etc. But he's also like "yeah, some people fail a thousand times before they get it right, some people just...fail a thousand times." IDK, I kind of like the idea, but the execution of "the people who weren't successes matter too" could have been better.
The lampshading of "don't tell me about the future, I don't want to know, don't create a paradox" being resolved with "oh what the hell" is underwhelming plotwise. Maybe an adaptation where Doc actually dies? Or instead of Marty getting the message to him, someone like Mayor Wilson or Biff inadvertently changes the future based on Marty's meddling?
Sometimes people interpret the ending as fridge horror--Marty is the only person who remembers his original timeline, his family can't understand why he's not "their" Marty, etc. What if instead it doesn't change, but Marty is like, "hey, Dad, did you ever write science fiction books?" or something. Then we learn that George has been keeping up his hobby the whole time, he's just too embarrassed to share it with anyone, but Marty gives him a nudge to be a little more assertive in the future?
My mom's review of Wicked when we first saw it in 2008 was "this is going to be the best high school musical because both the lead roles are women and there are so many more girls than boys of high school age who want to do musical theater." What about always-a-girl AU for Marty and Doc? I like the idea of eccentric spinster Emily Brown still going by "Doc," but facing a little more side-eying/social awkwardness in Hill Valley. Is the love triangle different with girl!Marty in 1955? Does Biff flirt with her and get out of Lorraine's way? Is her alias "Victoria Secret" instead of "Calvin Klein"? :D

( Ending spoilers )

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this has nothing to do with anything but it could be antarctica vagueblogging, I guess

2026-02-25T00:04:21Z

Again, not really saying anything new here, just trying to articulate part of the problem that makes lots of sense in my head but maybe isn't obvious to everyone else...

( Read more... )

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Etymology fun times

2026-02-21T16:51:51Z

Didn't agree with everything in this article, but it had an interesting deep dive into the translation of the Biblical phrase "love your enemies"

The Greeks had at least two words for enemies. An echthros was someone hated, a personal enemy. Polemioi were the people of a city that one's own community was contending against. (The root polemos means "war.")
...
The verb form is second-person imperative. Unlike English, Greek also has a third-person imperative, which is awkward to translate. If Jesus had used it, one might translate this commandment as "Let them love enemies," or passively as "Let enemies be loved." But the commandment is addressed to you.

"Echthroi" shows up in Madeleine L'Engle's "A Wind In The Door," I didn't realize that was a Biblical Greek word!

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Follow-up

2026-02-17T03:16:48Z

So for Christmas I got a cute little lunchbox with vintage baseball stickers on it, because of course. Then a week ago I misplaced my e-reader, even though I knew I had it on the train, it couldn't have gone far. I had brought the lunchbox because I wanted to store the e-reader and a new physical magazine subscription my cousin-once-removed got for me (my go-to Christmas wish list for the last couple years has been just "IDK, support some SFF short fiction markets, maybe get me a paywalled one) and some bananas for lunch for a long day of bell-ringing all in one place. You can tell where this is going.

Yes, after diligently calling the lost-and-found, uploading my "lost item" request (the e-reader is covered in a bunch of stickers I got from a Brandon Sanderson kickstarter, you'll definitely know it if you run across it!), etc. I finally checked the lunchbox again even though I had already checked it because it could not have gone far. The e-reader was standing on its side. Just pressed against the wall. Being stealthy.

So yeah, I am 100% my mother's child in some absentminded ways.

Now that that's back on track I'm continuing to have a normal and hinged amount of Antarctica feelings and/or working on speculative (?) poetry for some new calls. I get the sense that a lot of these editors like free verse a lot more than I do, so one of the poems at least will be more freeform than most of my stuff. But a lot of it winds up being blank verse/iambic pentameter because I'm just like that, apparently!

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